Moving the NSW ALP headquarters will not remove stench of decay

THERE are two ways of looking at NSW ALP boss Sam Dastyari's decision to move Labor Party headquarters from Sussex Street to Granville for next year's federal campaign.

The first is an obvious question. What did the people in western Sydney do to deserve this?

And the second: what difference will a location change make to people's perceptions of the sleaze, corruption and policy incompetence that now dogs the NSW Labor Party?

As Dastyari himself admits, it may mean little more than ensuring that decisions to kill Labor leaders will no longer be held at restaurants in Chinatown.

At most, moving the ALP headquarters and the election campaign team to western Sydney appears symbolic. But then symbols are important in politics.

And there are two important symbols that the 29-year-old Dastyari is trying to engineer.

The first is a recognition that the ALP in western Sydney is in serious trouble.

National polls do not reflect just how dire things are for the federal branch as it heads into an election year. Labor's hopes hinge around western Sydney.

Those familiar with the geography of the ALP office would also know that it is based in the building occupied by Unions NSW. In fact the ALP leases its space from the union. A physical separation from the industrial wing, which in NSW is not only responsible for the destruction of the party post-2007 but is now mired in the HSU scandal, is a strong symbol of intent to reform.

"We can reform or die," Dastyari says. "That is what voters are telling us. The way political power used to be exercised in the past can never be exercised like that again.

"Key decisions can no longer be made by powerbrokers in a Chinese restaurant."

He is of course talking about Sussex Street's collective decision, both the union wing and the party machine, to kill Morris Iemma's leadership over electricity reform in 2008, and then go on to kill two more state leaders and finally a federal one in Kevin Rudd.

From the '70s to the '90s, Sussex St became synonymous with political power in Australia.

But it wielded it with a policy sense based in the political centre.

Paul Keating, Neville Wran, Bob Carr, Morris Iemma were as much products of Sussex St as much as they were its architects.

Union heavyweights such as John Ducker and Barrie Unsworth, Graham Richardson and John Della Bosca became its enforcers. And leaders like Bob Hawke, Kim Beazley and Kevin Rudd were held to its influence.

It is now a joke. Unless something radical is done, NSW Labor will almost certainly enjoy the fate Dastyari warns of.

The western move is a response to the hammering Labor received out there in the 2011 state election and the one it is likely to receive at next year's federal poll.

"There is not one solution to the challenges we face," says Dastyari. "There is no quick fix.

"We need to listen to the community and rebuild both from a policy perspective and organisational level."

How moving an office to western Sydney will achieve any reform is a mystery. It probably won't. Change at a structural level will have a greater impact. But this is uncomfortable for the party. And it was on display last week in Canberra. When Dastyari and Joel Fitzgibbon defied Gillard by refusing to bind Labor's right on a vote on Palestine, it signalled a major shift in the game.

Dastyari knows that for real reform to take place, the power of the factions to bind on votes in parliament must be removed. It sort of happened by accident to Gillard last week when she was rolled on the Palestine issue.

But this does not just have implications for the structures of the Labor Party, it directly challenges the institutions of the Westminster system.

Fitzgibbon posed this question to his Hunter branch members on Sunday: "Is the Westminster system broken?" It's a good question. As is the question of whether moving Labor Party to western Sydney will make any difference to voters.

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